It is surely the task of the poet to find the image that will transmute the
'unbearable' into 'the bearable'. If he/she cannot do that,.. well - let
him/her go dig ditches. ----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Cooper <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 22 September 2001 02:47
Subject: Billy Collins and me


> This article's been drifting round the electrickery of a few people's
> e-mails, and a couple of other lists, so I thought I'd post it here too.
>
> A subject too big for poetry
>
> Don't ask the U.S. laureate Billy Collins to write about Tuesday's
disaster.
> The terror is overwhelming, he tells SANDRA MARTIN
>
> By SANDRA MARTIN
>
> Saturday, September 15, 2001
>
> Like most people, U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins was following the sweet
> banality of routine on Tuesday morning. "I was driving back from taking
the
> dog out around the lake we usually walk around," he said in an interview
> from his home in Westchester County in New York, when he heard on the
radio
> that there was a fire in the World Trade Center.
>
> "I know people don't smoke any more, but I thought somebody had thrown a
> match in a wastebasket," he recalled. When he got home, he turned on the
> television as the second plane was plowing into the south tower, an image
> has been crashing into his forehead about every 90 seconds since then. "I
> think that it has created a kind of burn on people's retinas," he says.
>
> "Will you ever write a poem about what happened on Tuesday?"
>
> "No," he says in a response that comes quickly and emphatically.
>
> "Why not?"
>
> "You can't approach something like this frontally in a poem - at least I
> can't. It will knock you over. It is like walking into a big wave. You
will
> fall on your bathing suit."
>
> Isn't it his job to set aside his feelings and write a poem offering us
> solace, inspiration and wisdom? No, says Collins. "I am a person before I
am
> the poet laureate."
>
> Rather than toiling away in an office in the basement of the White House
> composing birthday poems, his role is to be a literary ambassador,
> travelling the country and raising consciousness about the value of
poetry.
>
> Still, being poet laureate is an odd position for Collins because he can't
> think of any activity that is more private, solitary and deeply subjective
> than writing poetry. "Poets, as they become published and go out and give
> readings, move out of that condition of solitude into something like a
> public life, and the position of poet laureate is the most public extreme
> that a poet can achieve. In some unfortunate ways, it pulls you out of the
> cell of privacy that you tend to write in."
>
> The scale of the devastation has reduced the idea of fame to rubble - for
> once, the famous are ordinary. That is the way it should be in a tragedy
of
> this magnitude, he says.
>
> "Maybe some people can say things better or differently than others, but
> there are no experts here. My reactions are not aesthetic or poetic or
> professional. They are simply human."
>
> Tuesday made Collins realize how very different this tragedy was from the
> Oklahoma bombing. "That was one horrible moment," he says. "This seems to
be
> the beginning of many horrible moments, and I think it makes the future so
> unsettled and so strange that it is impossible to walk into this ongoing
> storm of uncertainty and find a position to speak from, let alone to write
> something."
>
> Poems -- at least good ones -- do not spring forth fully formed on
command.
> The creative imagination works away in private, digesting direct and
> vicarious experience. For Collins, a poem takes place in "an Emily
Dickinson
> backyard." It is not a "directly reactive performance to public events,"
he
> says, adding that he doesn't "write a poem with a gun to my head" or rush
> things into print.
>
> Besides, he feels you can't "really get your arms around" something this
> big, that a poem could get crushed by the sheer weight of the event.
"There
> is a tremendous lot of bad poetry that has been written about subjects
that
> are too big for the poem," he says. Poetry has always been a vehicle to
> contain and express grief, but that doesn't mean you need a new poem every
> time there is a public or private tragedy. People take solace from
rereading
> old and familiar ones.
>
> "Poetry is one of the original grief counselling centres," Collins says.
"It
> has always been a way of giving form to wailing and to the convulsions of
> grief and in that sense, it is always relevant because it gives form to
> emotions that are flying out of control."
>
> Collins has been writing poetry long enough and well enough - he has a
stack
> of collections including Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected
> Poems, which is being published by Random House this autumn - to know that
> poetry flourishes in private moments of reflection. Making poetry too
> specific is the best way to give it a limited shelf life, he says.
>
> "There is something basic about any human experience, including this one,
> but the specifics of this terror are overwhelming. Poetry always has to
find
> the private scope, and the events that are being played out this week are
on
> too cosmic and shocking a scale," he says. "You don't read poetry to find
> out about the poet, you read poetry to find out about yourself."
>
> Before he retreated to the private spaces that poets inhabit, Collins
> reminded me that the late American poet Richard Hugo said, "Never write a
> poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it;" Dickinson
> said, "Tell the truth but tell it slant;" and W. B. Yeats wrote the
> definitive comment about poetry on demand in On being asked for a War
Poem.
>
> I think it better that in times like these
> A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
> We have no gift to set a statesman right;
> He has had enough of meddling who can please
> A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
> Or an old man upon a winter's night.
>
> Billy Collins will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors
in
> Toronto in October...
>
>
> Any comments?
>
> It seems to say things I feel are true for me right now. I haven't yet the
> inkling, though it may be the only way I will discover I'm writing about
it,
> will be if I am following Emily Dickinson's advice where I "tell the
truth,
> but tell it slant."
>
> (True art, I guess, needs anger. So will I feel the same when Wild West
Bush
> sticks on his sheriff's badge and goes to get the baddie, Dead Or Alive? I
> remember the silence and the subsequent guilt I felt when the Gulf War
> happened, and, before that, the Falklands war.)
>
> Bob
>
>
>
> From: Bob Cooper
> [log in to unmask]
>
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